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There is nothing savage about the art of Richmond Barthé—and, if there were, he would be the first to tame it. If you have any doubts, head right for Feral Benga, in a gallery retrospective of a thoroughly sophisticated artist, at Michael Rosenfeld through July 26.

What may sound feral is a 1935 sculpture, with the skilled modeling of the School of Paris brought to New York. And what may sound like the sculptor’s considered judgment, harsh or appreciative, of a wild man is the stage name of a cabaret dancer. He may seem to be raising a savage weapon, perhaps a machete, above his head, but it is a performer’s graceful step on a Paris stage and in Barthé’s art. Its pedestal size makes it easy to admire the handling of bronze and the preternatural slimness better suited to a cabaret act than to a state of nature. Benga must have chosen his feral handle to reflect stereotypes of the black male, catering to them and playing against them, but there is little trace of African art or the “primitivism” that haunted Pablo Picasso. When it comes to Barthé, Modernism yes, irony no.

He looks rather sophisticated himself. Photos open the show with him and Alain Locke, a leading intellectual of the Harlem Renaissance, or actors playing the parts, dapper and dressed to the nines. They look much the same in archival footage of an exhibition opening packed with sophisticates. Isaac Julien, who co-curated the new exhibition, came upon it while preparing for Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die), his video in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Julien is claiming an ancestor for his own artistry and intellect and for African American art. He is also claiming an image of blackness that does not exclude gays like Barthé, Langston Hughes, Carl Van Vechten, and himself.

He can easily find one in the sculptor’s standing males like Benga. They are often sexualized and always in debt to European tradition, like Black Narcissus from 1929. You may remember Narcissus in myth as so in love with his image reflected in water that he drowns. Here he, too, is lithe and attractive, but also vulnerable. He could be pleading for love, like Julien’s or yours. He holds what might be a cucumber or a penis.

Barthé wants his figures to be at once mythic and particular, in the present. Others include laborers, and the dualism continues in portrait heads. They extend his art to women, with enormous sympathy and with a Black Madonna as well. They may still border on precious, without the edge and complexity of greater artists or blackness in America. Sculpture in general can feel like a footnote to the Met’s survey of the Harlem Renaissance, after paintings and photographs—and to Harlem’s vitality in literature and music. For Julien, though, statues never die.

Locke contemplates them in his video at the Whitney, in an idealized setting—perhaps the Barnes Foundation, in dialogue with Albert C. Barnes. So, in entering the darkness, will you, only the sculpture may be hard to see. You may not even notice it beside Locke’s firm but gentle gaze. Then, too, the new show opens not with sculpture, but rather those photos. Julien’s version of history is fluid enough to limit its own impressive claims for the past. He calls the show “A New Day Is Coming,” which speaks instead of the future.

That optimism infused the Harlem Renaissance. For Barthé, sculptures were studies in heroism, almost to his death in 1989. He called one work The Negro Looks Ahead. Still, he looked first and foremost not to the future, but to past and present. He tempts one to run one’s hands over a head like a phrenologist or lover, to imagine a mind in full. It will not be the savage mind.

To wrap up on the theme of new media from the last two posts, this past summer I offered a partial report on “Signals” then at MOMA. I did not have time to ask more pointedly what it said about new media—and what that left unsaid. Now that we have time, consider now what it was not. It was not interactive, although you may spot yourself on a monitor now and then.

It was not a record of performance as for Nam June Paik and Richard Serra, an immersive experience as for Bill Viola, a blunt political message as for Martha Rosler, sound art and historical memory as for Susan Philipsz, self-examination as for Lynn Hershman Leeson, or a philosophical meditation as for Gary Hill. It was not a step toward augmented reality, virtual reality, and AI. You may have seen several of these on the way out, in works from the permanent collection, displayed on nine monitors set in six formidable black boxes. But what do all those nots leave for a decent history or a show?

MoMA sees video art as political—not just a tool for protest, as for Rosler, but political in itself. The show’s very title points to both. And that means a constant tension between its use on behalf of power and its ability to push back. With Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, Paik himself plays on both. Still not convinced? Me neither, but that is where artist voices take over. They put 1984, the year many people started on the Web, behind them.

This being a trendy affair, here politics is identity politics. It can come from collectives, like the Black Audio Film Collective, with John Akomfrah, and American Artist, a black collective that also appears in “Refigured.” It can be an individual assertion as well, like that of Carlos Motta on gender identity or Emily Jacir between Ramallah and New York. Tony Cokes calls for a “black celebration,” but it will have to settle for plain text on a black screen. More often, though, identity is caught up in a mass movement of people between worlds. And that is where revolution enters the picture.

Nil Yalta speaks for Turkish refugees in Paris, Chto Delat for Crimeans in danger from Russia. Harun Farocki and Andre Ujica have their Videograms of Revolution, Artur Zmijewski his twenty channels’ worth of uprising, as Democracies. This being trendy, too, much here is pro forma, a revolution in spirit but not in the medium or in art. It picks up on the very weakness of the Internet, TV, and their voices. Syms also recites her one hundred and eighty Lessons on blackness, but who needs another lesson? Cacophony really can drown things out.

Yet the medium itself pushes back, starting with so many monitors in the show’s first room. Here images become installations. Yalta’s stack is another Tower of Babel. Ming Wong’s Windows on the World could be a control room, for a television studio or a space station. Motta leans in the opposite direction. His installation all but outgrows its roots in video, with pink triangles for his gayness and striped carpet on the floor.

Some artists leave installations to their own devices, in more ways than one. Dara Birnbaum views revolution and repression in Tiananmen Square through an entire wall of devices, from phones to TVs. Amar Kanwar sets nineteen channels and the torn pages from books and magazines, into wide-open metal frames. Frances Stark uses custom frames creatively, too, for his “mix tapes” of U.S. Greatest Hits (meaning wars), while Information America for Julia Scher spreads out above an ordinary desktop. Stan VanDerBeek invites one into a Movie-Drome. More than anyone else, even Paik, he also takes one back to the real question, the roots of new media.

Those black boxes out front are merely a postscript, but also the most impressive installation of all. Each is a “viewing station,” with a narrow black shelf coming out from the box for seating. Their mass and repetition look back not just to new media, but also to Minimalism—in the same galleries that, three years ago, held Donald Judd. Do they also offer a more honest history of video art? A more traditional history has the last word after all. It has also been televised, and next time it will be on the Web.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

To pick up from last time on AI, its potential, and its limits, you can practically bathe in MoMA’s lobby video, because Leslie Thornton herself did to kick it off. Visitors will see it first thing and bathe in it, too. Together with past reports on new media in museum lobbies and their implications for marketing museums, it is also the subject of a longer review in my latest upload.

Is the Museum of Modern Art New York’s most relaxing, cuddly museum? It still has art that once shocked the world, from Dada to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon—and we can debate another time whether and why they no longer do. A rehanging for its 2023 “fall reveal” with rooms apart for black artists and James Rosenquist, with his F-111 covering the walls, does everything it can to restore their shocks as well. Still, not only does it have the best lobby seating in town. It also puts on a show for the seated and standeed alike. A towering, slowly churning projection by Leslie Thornton would calm anyone down.

Thornton’s play with symmetry in new media has stood out in the galleries and art fairs. Here she lay down in torrential rains to feel the torrential bliss. At the same time, a scientist was building a device for detecting the antimatter that bathes the entire universe. His plans unfold on a chalk board in what could pass for graffiti art—and in real life as interwoven, lightly colored strips. Rain accounts for a silvery downpour in the top half of her vertically divided diptych, while the science alternates with a mysterious darker churning just below.

Neither will change your life or change science. Particle physics is well past the point where the discovery of the muon had a physicist asking “who ordered that?” The hunt for antimatter, important as it is, cannot bring back the urgency of the hunt for evidence of the Big Bang. Still, they do give weight to a steady flow. Without them, Thornton’s video might be hard to tell from its lobby predecessor by Refik Anadol. With them, it takes on at least a modicum of structure and mystery.

Still, for all their differences, they are crowd pleasers precisely because they will not change your day. Anadol billed his rising, swirling colors as an AI-generated tour of the museum, while Thornton calls her new media HANDMADE. (The scientist’s chalk board does have a space for “code.”) Apparently art does not need AI for the visual equivalent of elevator music. Maybe AI should try instead next time for the real thing.

Then again, maybe elevator music, too, is better the old-fashioned way, by hand. Upstairs, Alexandre Estrela salvages plates from a defunct printing press in Portugal for his Flat Bells. As the title suggests, he has found a way to flatten “Tubular Bells.” He extends the resonance so that striking the plates rings out like chimes. In between the chimes comes a dull, throbbing musical hum. He supplies seating, too, up in the fourth-floor studio so that you can relax and enjoy it, through January 7.

The plates also serve as inspiration for a projection as soothing as the audio. They once served for advertising, which Estrela abstracts away—in color on four monitors, fading in and out of black on larger screens, and in blood red on the entire far wall. He sees their patterns as prototypes for twentieth-century design. Does it seem strange that a printing press has become an object of nostalgia? Maybe this is indeed a digital age, but with retro devices and analog memories. Or maybe the shock of the new was the background music to modern life all along.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Once artists had workshops, with young assistants to grind pigments, to prepare a painting’s ground, and at times to paint. Now they may have only a studio and a computer. They may work out their thoughts on it, in virtual sketch pads. They may even call the results art.

Harold Cohen does, but he leaves the software to carry out the details, with plotters as its pen and acrylic for color. It gives him a dual canvas for his own art, in software and, ultimately, on the wall—and I work this together with recent reports on the new media of an artist’s lifetime as a longer review and my latest upload.

Cohen, then close to forty, got the idea at the University of California, San Diego back in the 1960s, and he set out to make it real. By the 1970s it had its own exhibition and a name, AARON (like, I presume, AI-ron). It has new relevance today, when people cannot talk often enough about their fears and hopes for AI. It also has a retrospective at the Whitney, through May 19, but what exactly is it? Is it an assistant, a collaborator, a competitor, an alter ego, a friend, or simply a medium? Could it have, like an assertive child, a mind of its own?

You may have heard this story before—and not just online. When Leonardo da Vinci painted an angel for Andrea del Verrocchio in 1475, the master, it is said, was so awed that he never painted again. To less romantic scholars, it was merely what would have been impossible before the Renaissance and medieval money, a business decision. Verrocchio had a demand to meet for both painting and sculpture, so why not specialize? It is only fitting that AI most often makes the business section of The New York Times today. But could the label conceivably apply to Cohen starting fifty years ago?

Regardless, his show makes a flashy first impression. It devotes an entire wall for what could equally well be video art or a painting’s coming to be. At any given moment, it is a work in progress, and Cohen considers his task an examination of an artist’s cognitive processes. Others might put software on a diet of Web sites, with every new work filling in the blanks. That could leave instructions to such generalities as a painting about X in the style of Y. The British-born artist would rather take things step by step.

That big mural really moves. If AARON does have a mind of its own, it thinks fast. It lays out one shape after another and on top of another, for an increasingly dense landscape of truly wild flowers, before starting again. Color fills the black outlines as quickly as they appear. When it comes to actual canvas, too, Cohen’s strength lies in those layers. Subjects include still life and human figures akin to portraits, with a seated woman behind a flower pot, for a compressed space within a deeper world.

Modernism was always about space and its perception, and his early work picks up on Paul Cézanne and his bathers. It sets bathers within that denser, wilder landscape. AARON may not realize them as individuals, and what look portraits might be studies in the very idea of introspection. Eyes cast downward, and a hand raised to lips might hold a cigarette or serve as a shield. Cohen, in turn, gains over time from a return to basics in the software itself. Sketches reduce figures to jointed lines, like machines.

Their style may look more appropriate for advertising or nursery school than for art, much as I enjoyed that video mural. Even there, software has it limits, although human art can be formulaic enough, too. If AI from Refik Anadol amounts to visual elevator music, its successor in MoMA’s lobby, by Leslie Thornton, has its own soothing swirls. For all the hype, does any of this add up to intelligence? Stendahl quipped that God’s only excuse is that he does not exist, and one might say the same of AI.

For all that, AARON’s landscapes have an appealing density, figures and still life an appealing simplicity. Cohen’s premise is more interesting still. The Whitney considers the canvases the art and the video a look behind the scenes to their creation, and it gives equal weight to both. It has only a handful of paintings, from the museum collection, the video, and two plotters that Cohen designed himself. There have to be (at least) two, because software can turn out any number of multiples from the same instructions, as theme and variations. One might think of AI as more an aspiration than a fact, but one can always hope.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

To continue from last time on the theme of inheritance and diversity, Sadie Barnette would like you to make yourself at home, her home. She opens “Inheritance” at the Whitney with spray paint, photos, and a nice, plush sofa—and I work this together with earlier reports on an artist’s extended family in Pepón Osorio as a longer review and my latest upload, with apologies for using the excuse of the theme to catch up with a review that I never managed to post here.

Not that you can sit in her sofa, for this is after all a museum, but then you might not care to try. It looks comforting enough, but too tacky for words, in a silvery holographic vinyl speckled with rhinestones. So do the prints and posters behind it, which she claims to be a black woman’s most precious memories. They look more like ads, although one bears her name in the garish font and colors of a birthday card. They might celebrate commercialism and family or back away from both. No matter, for both are her inheritance.

“Inheritance” takes its name from a film by Ephraim Asili, which plays out in an alcove near the end, through February 4. The director charts his dedication to black power and the black arts, with archival and created footage, although a young woman in the film loses patience with them, too. (As a matter of fact, Barnette’s father co-founded the Black Panthers.) A video by WangShu might be speaking for her when its narrator pleads for more than positive images. Yet the exhibition wants it both ways, critical but a celebration. It cannot get over painful memories, but it insists on a happy ending in the present.

When Modernism vowed to “make it new,” it turned from art about the past to art about itself, and Postmodernism repaid the favor by turning that lens on Modernism. Critics began to question the loss of its inheritance and “originality of the avant-garde.” And the Whitney includes a foremost critic in Sherrie Levine—her photographs of photographs by Walker Evans. Decades later, that very criticism has become the good news, as exhibitions everywhere embrace diversity and its global heritage. What, though, does that leave for “Inheritance” beyond a highly selective and utterly superfluous recap of art today? What, too, if that recap is painful, prefabricated, and commercial?

They say that charity begins at home, and the curator, Rujeko Hockley, begins with family. The first room centers on Mary Kelly, whose 1973 film lingered over a woman’s belly in the final moments before birth. (Hey, we all have to come from somewhere.) A father figure makes his appearance in film by Kevin Jerome Everson, blowing out the candles at age ninety-three, but mothers abound. Bruce and Norman Yonemoto mix up their personal histories with cigarette commercials, much like Sadie Barnette, but they, too, are enjoying themselves. If your childhood was anything but happy, do not look to the Whitney for support.

Theaster Gates has traced African American history through family and friends, while museums have singled out the Black Arts Movement and a legendary black-run gallery. Sure enough, two more rooms cover African Americans and the “global South.” Todd Gray manages to sum up the entirety of colonialism in a single photo collage. An-My Lê drapes a banner across a statue of a Confederate general. Could, though, an artist’s greatest inheritance be art itself? A room in-between picks up on Modernism and Minimalism, with a smashed tube chair from Wade Guyton, a silver striker by Hank Willis Thomas, and a red curve after Ellsworth Kelly by Carissa Rodriguez, cast in salt.

Still, what is the point? Surely others have had had equally moving accounts of Africa, slavery, and Black Lives Matter. And has any artist not looked back, like Cecily Brown to Flemish still life? Should artists be proud of their inheritance or ashamed? And what will others inherit from them? As it turns out, a lot, and it does much to redeem a confused and confusing show.

These are vivid memories, in all their pleasure and pain. Beverly Buchanan recalls the rural sheds of her ancestors, Mary Beth Edelson their mothers and gods, John Outterbridge their prayers and their dance. In a five-channel video, silhouettes and stereotypes from Kara Walker come to life. On the dark side, Faith Ringgold maps the United States of Africa, while Cameron Rowland recreates police radio, in all is racism. Kambui Olujimi pictures forced labor beneath a darkening sky as ghosts. Ana Mendieta leaves her impression in shifting landscapes and unsteady sands.

Just as much, one can relish the ambivalence. Lorraine O’Grady does, in her white dress and witty incursions into Central Park. So does David Hartt at the publisher or Ebony and Jet, where African art looks ever so forlorn. So, too, does Sophie Rivera, whose photograph of a child never quite emerges from its shadows and reflections, as I Am U. That video by WangShu lingers over luxury high-rises, cut off from the life below. Yet every so often the glass of their towers allows a view through to the sea.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

To pick up from last time on Native American art (and apologies for a review that never posted in time for the show), art for Natalie Ball looks thrown together at the last minute, on the cheap, but give her time. The details matter to her, as part and parcel of her heritage. Yet that still left her at the Whitney this winter wondering who she is and what she has done, through February 19.

Gallery-goers are used by now to art as taking out the garbage. Nairy Baghramian fills the sculptural niches of the Met façade with what look like discards from museum infrastructure, but with brighter colors and less reason for being, through May 28. For Ball, though, going through the trash takes on the urgency of finding herself.

It cannot be easy for a Native American, whose lands have been seized and people have been killed, or an African American, who must plead even now that black lives matter. And Ball identifies as at once black, Modoc, and Klamath, tribes in Northern California and Southern Oregon, where she lives to this day. She says as much in opening wall text, which takes care to appear in English, Spanish, and a native language. Yet it appears on plywood, about as makeshift a material as you can get. More plywood appears as armature for sculpture, as flooring beneath it, and covering an empty wall, like a poor excuse for wallpaper. She is not saying just how it relates to her people, but then there is a lot she does not care to say.

The materials of her sculpture look just as shoddy and just as meaningful, up to a point. They include rawhide, which sounds right, and newsprint, which records things for posterity, but much else as well—including chests of drawers from which she may have drawn more. Collectively, they suggest ritual dress and, a title confirms, tribal dancers, but their colorful patterns give way to smileys. She might have salvaged them from whatever she had. Unlike the elaborate outfits of Jeffrey Gibson, they could be just as plausibly thrown away. Has everything she valued become empty rituals for empty suits?

The tallest sculpture seems itself unsure how to stand. Its two poles of polished wood never quite give up their memories of the trees that supplied them. They rise, suspended from the ceiling, but cut the cord and the entirety will collapse. You can wait as long as you like, for Ball has put out plenty of seating, but of gray folding chairs that might easily be on loan for the occasion. They also seem to have fallen where they may. Have a seat where you like.

he title alone seems to have arrived in a hurry. bilwi naats Ga’niipci means we smell like the outside, but Ball does not explain further. Does it mark her people’s distance from white America or her distance from them? Is she herself the ultimate outsider artist? Metaphors are elusive, like art. Ball’s place at the Whitney is itself both inside and out—the lobby gallery, free to the public because it stands within the museum but well outside its ropes.

Art has had no end of installations cobbled together from untraditional materials and popular culture. Who needs another? If it stands out, it is for her lack of certainty. Born in 1980, she can proclaim her identity, but she cannot pin it down. If that leaves me unsatisfied, so be it. For the record, only about six hundred Modoc survive, all in Oregon. And there she stands, inside and out.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.